Seven words he’ll never say again

George Carlin died today. He was 71. Carlin was a true original, one of the few comics who actually got people to think about some things in new ways, and — unlike, say Mort Sahl — managing to stay funny while doing so over the course of a generation.

But his humor was angry, and his hippy-dippy outlook, cute in the early 70’s, curdled into a know-nothing angry leftism of the “they own all of you, we’re all tools in the System, man” variety. (You know – the System that made him very, very comfortable despite his harsh criticism of it.) He was ultimately only a comedian, and hence his bleak “social criticisms” were seldom better enunciated than the facile juxtapositions found in editorial cartoons. But as a vanguard of envelope-pushing in the realm of new levels of public indelicacy he was regarded as a sage, a modern-day Twain, by would-be culture critics of the Don Imus rank.

Are we thinking of the same George Carlin? He did a parody of drug addled leftists called the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. He did a whole routine specifically to annoy feminists. And he thought environmentalism was full of it.

Now he’s dead just like we’ll all be, but his words and his routines will live on..

Mary, it’s true — he didn’t like hippies, or liberals. But he was an angry man and absolutely spouted the conspiratorial, leftist line. I happen to just have heard an extended excerpt of his routine on Sunday… oddly enough.